Michael Jackson's death pushes internet to limits

Websites struggle under people's appetite for breaking news

Shares

The news of Michael Jackson's death prompted a deluge of entertainment websites to slow down last night, with the likes of Twitter posting an apology for the service underperforming due to heavy demand.

The popularity of the King of Pop was plain to see when some of the internet's biggest websites ground to a halt.

"We have had to temporarily disable search results from the logged-in homepage of twitter.com. We are working on the underlying problem and will bring back these features as soon as we can," explained the Twitter blog during the midst of confusion over Michael Jackson's death.

Broken by TMZ

Computerweekly.com is reporting that performance index firm Keynote Systems also noted a slowdown in website response times with ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, SF Chronicle and Yahoo News all taking much longer to load – up to nine seconds.

The death of Michael Jackson at the age of 50 was broken on TMZ.com, a popular rumour and celebrity gossip site. Due to the sheer volume of web traffic TMZ experienced, it too was temporarily taken down.